Heartbreaker
by mozzafiato
Summary: 'Maya wonders if she loves the darkness because it used to be the light.' -ON HIATUS-
1. one

_One_

Maya vividly remembers the feeling of the hard wooden chair pressing into her bones uncomfortably. She remembers the brisk winter air rushing in from the open window, sending shivers down the spine of her small frame as her father rambled on and on about his youth. He speaks with such gusto that his giant hand mistakenly crashes into his glass of scotch ( _straight, on the rocks_ ), and he mutters a short string of curse words before barking an order to her mother to clean it up. She jumps up without a word; she never has words. In fact, Maya hardly remembers her mother uttering anything short of _yes_ and _no_ prior to her eleventh year in this life. As her mother busied herself with a sponge, Maya courageously straightened in her seat, ignoring her trembling hands, and asked her mother for a story from her childhood. Time stood still; her mother shot her a look of confused fear down from the floor, while her father narrowed his eyes dangerously and began to speak through grit teeth of how he _tamed_ her.

He spoke of how he saved her from a life of uncertainty and insecurity. How he _loved_ her, how he kept a tainted smile on her face with a knife at her back and gentle whispers of worthlessness ringing in her ears. Her mother does not speak. Her mother continues wiping at the liquid covering the floor, covering the table, covering _everything-_ and Maya does not fail to see the uncanny similarity the liquor has to her father's existence. Anything that does not come from him is buried deep underneath his influence, simmering below the surface for what could only be an eternity.

Even now, years after the divorce, her father comes to pick her up for the allotted four hours a week with a booming voice that never fails to fill the entire home. The voice is still a dark, gray fog that does its best to seep into every corner of the life they've finally made for themselves. It crawls over cropped pictures, sinks into the yellowed wallpaper, and swirls down the blood-stained drain with malice tugging it to and fro until they've traveled back in time. Her mother still makes space for it.

Maya was once caught sneaking back into the haunted abode with a dark-haired boy, after a particularly gruelling two hours with her father (he insisted he had a business affair to attend to, but she had seen the thick stack of ones shoved hastily into his pocket as he exited the bank with a smirk on his face). The boy laughed in her face as she begged him to stay, her mother waiting patiently outside the door with tear-filled eyes and trembling knees. And Maya was taught once, only that once, to be proud; to never be swallowed by someone who was an ever-lingering presence in _every shallow breath she took_. But how was she supposed to absorb her mother's words if they were spoken from the belly of the beast she once loved?

Maya wonders if she loves the darkness because it used to be the light.


	2. two

_Two_

Maya didn't realize the importance of emergency exits until a Sunday afternoon, two months after her father walked out of her life for good.

She didn't learn the importance of escape routes until her heartbeat was unrecognizable- until her tongue betrayed her with nervous stutters and her hands shook as she gently extracted the bouquet of sunflowers from his grasp. She felt an unfamiliar happiness encompass her as he leaned down, brushing his lips against her own in a silent quest for permission. She was content as she granted it, allowing herself to be gently pushed back inside with hands tangled in her golden hair, and pressed against her flushed cheeks, and resting on her porcelain hips until her back touched the wall.

She was okay for those moments, before she noticed that her heartbeat sounded an awful lot like slamming doors. Before her body suddenly quaked with the realization that the pounding in her ears bared a startling resemblance to her father's footsteps, walking down the hall, through the front door, down the patio steps and across the yard. She could have sworn that the last beat before she threw the flowers in the trash and stomped away with tears in her eyes sounded just like a closing car door.

Her footsteps echoing through the kitchen and out the back door rang out like every plea of "don't go, don't go, don't go", which she learned that very day to shove back down to her core, ignoring the burning in her throat as she forced herself to swallow her weakness. Among other lessons, Maya's father taught her to be the first one to walk away. She filed it neatly between "don't speak in public" and "frozen peas are good for bruises", embedding it with a swig of a flask and a little gray tablet stolen from her mother's purse.

"Leave before they realize you're not worth staying for" fit nicely in her arsenal, and quickly became the most useful of her father's mottos.


End file.
